It's been a long time, Dad, but this Series is for you

My father died when I was 13, but he has been my father for every day of my life, and that might be the reason I'm so thoroughly enjoying this idea of the White Sox in the World Series.

Truth be told, I've got a small stake in it.

I am a newspaperman, and it probably doesn't hurt newspaper sales to have a local team involved in something as big as the World Series, even if that team is not the team the parent company owns and the coverage, no matter how expansive and elaborate, tends to engender a certain skepticism in those suspicious South Side precincts where my father lived his entire life.

That's a story for another day. But know this: I'd be haunted by the image of him wagging an admonishing finger from the grave if the sports section for which I'm responsible were as "Cub-unish" as some critics claim, even in this hour of the White Sox's greatest triumph.

My father was first generation Irish-American, a big, ebullient guy, a product of the Bridgeport-Canaryville area that regarded the White Sox as a family heirloom to be treasured and passed on with a respectful sense of team history. Imagine his consternation when his first-born son, my older brother, wandered off the reservation and became a Cubs fan.

I spent much of my youth observing and occasionally moderating Ernie Banks-vs.-Luis Aparicio debates. Great fun they were, and very educational for a child trying to get a grasp of this game that had captivated the two of them. I tried to remain neutral; how do you choose between your father and your only brother, who included you in pretty much everything? I miss those days even now.

My father's loyalties were understandable. He had grown up about a Sherm Lollar home run from the old Comiskey Park, and his family, his church, his work and his ball team seemed to be the most important things in his life in the years I knew him. The demands of providing for No. 1 didn't leave much time (or money) for No. 4, so Bob Elson's radio voice was his primary link to the Sox on those nights when he sat at the kitchen table with a quart of Hamm's beer and his paperwork.

Sometimes I'd sit with him, and I'd hear him grumble that Nellie Fox swung at too many first pitches and Jungle Jim Rivera was a "kodaker"--an old neighborhood putdown of an unnecessarily flashy player, a showoff.

Though he generally liked Al Lopez, he'd groan and question the longtime manager's sanity any time he got Turk Lown or Jim Brosnan up in the bullpen.

The dreaded Yankees

Yankee games were the toughest on him. Lopez's Sox and the Casey Stengel Yankees went at each other hard in those days, and the extra little charge in Elson's normally sonorous voice reflected the intensity on the field, in the stands and the entire South Side, for that matter.

Billy Pierce and Whitey Ford would kick off the series in a Friday night showdown between two clever lefties that would pack the ballpark. Pierce would nurse a 1-0 lead into the 6th or 7th inning, and then someone--most likely a second-tier slugger such as Hank Bauer or Johnny Blanchard--would pop one with a man on, and the Sox would lose a tough one.

On Saturday they might play extra innings before the Yankees won. Then they'd split the Sunday doubleheader, the Yankees would leave town with a two-games-bigger lead and that would be that for this year.

I'd look at my father and wonder why he did this to himself.

Finally, in 1959, there was a breakthrough. The Sox held off the Yankees and the Cleveland Indians, won the pennant for the first time in 40 years and brought the World Series to Chicago.

I don't know that I ever saw my father happier, even though he got no closer to Comiskey Park than I did with the transistor radio I sneaked into my 4th-grade classroom.

The heartbreak he missed

He was gone 4 1/2 years later, and the World Series hadn't been back to Chicago until this year. I never equated one with the other, and there was really no reason to. But the White Sox were my father's team, and I guess they just didn't mean as much to me with him not around to remind me of why they mattered. And if he hadn't died in February of '64, that year's pennant race might have killed him. A really good White Sox team with Gary Peters, Juan Pizarro and Pete Ward and some other decent hitters finished one measly game behind the hated Yankees, who lost the World Series to a St. Louis Cardinals team that had filched Lou Brock from the Cubs earlier that season. Any Chicagoan who changed allegiance that year ...

I didn't really change allegiance, but I found myself gravitating toward the National League. There was more variety: four pennant winners in the five seasons between 1959 and 1963, while the stodgy Yankees were the American League World Series team every year from 1960 to '64.